Jane Austen Does the Monster Mash

The much anticipated “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” hits shelves today, and it’s already number one in contemporary literature on Amazon. Eighty-five per cent Austen, fifteen per cent a television writer named Seth Grahame-Smith, and one hundred per cent terrible, the book effectively undermines the seriousness of, in the original, the Bennet sisters’ matrimonial quest by suggesting a non-linear positive correlation between the number of zombies present during courtship and the degree of difficulty in obtaining a husband (graphic mine):

However, if the female slays a zombie in the presence of the male during courtship, the difficulty is reduced somewhat by an upsurge in the male’s lust. Take, for instance, the scene in which Darcy denies to dance with Elizabeth, calling her “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” In the original, nothing much happens, but now:

The warrior code demanded she avenge her honour. Elizabeth reached down to her ankle, taking care not to draw attention. There, her hand met the dagger concealed beneath her dress. She meant to follow this proud Mr. Darcy outside and open his throat.

But no sooner had she grabbed the handle of her weapon than a chorus of screams filled the assembly hall, immediately joined by the shattering of window panes. Unmentionables poured in, their movements clumsy yet swift; their burial clothing in a range of untidiness…

As guests fled in every direction, Mr. Bennett’s [sic] voice cut through the commotion. “Girls! Pentagram of Death!”…

From a corner of the room, Mr. Darcy watched Elizabeth and her sisters work their way outward, beheading zombie after zombie as they went. He knew of only one other woman in all of Great Britain who wielded a dagger with such skill, such grace, and deadly accuracy.

The plot continues in this manner—Lizzie, Darcy, zombies, blah, blah, blah—until the end, and there isn’t much more to say about it, except to reiterate is awfulness. The experience of reading it is like taking a walk in a park on a beautiful day and knowing that a thunderstorm or something else deeply unpleasant (say, a zombie) might spring up at any moment and ruin everything. In this instance, the something unpleasant is Grahame-Smith’s writing. But perhaps I’m being too harsh: I met a fan of the book last weekend who praised it as “an intelligent fart joke.”

In any case, the book got me thinking: what is it about Austen that appeals to fantasy writers? “PPZ” (as it is known on Facebook) might be the most simplistic Austen-fantasy mashup, but it is by no means the first: both J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer claim her as their primary literary influence. There is a popular British television show, “Lost in Austen,” in which a young woman discovers a portal from our world into “Pride and Prejudice.” And there are more examples in the works: a film called “Pride and Predator,” and “Jane Bites Back,” a novel in which Austen herself turns into a vampire.

So what’s it all about? Is it simply the thrill of lifting (so to speak) Ms. Austen’s petticoats? I wrote to Michael Gamer, a professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania who teaches a course on Austen and popular culture. He suggested that it probably had much to do with the explosion of fan fiction brought about by the Internet, but it might also be a matter of subtext:

Austen’s fiction often carries with it a sense of mystery and menace, of something extraordinary going on just out of sight. “Northanger Abbey” sends up this kind of horror fiction wonderfully; yet in the novel there’s also General Tilney, a schemer capable of ungenteel behavior and even violence. Still, my favorite novel of this kind is probably “Emma,” which has the most mundanely realistic narration of Austen’s works yet hides the most torrid romance in Austen’s fiction: the one between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. In this sense, there’s a whole other novel hiding under Emma’s placid surface, and in reading the one novel you catch glimpses of the other.

I like this formulation, suggesting, as it does, that the authors of these mashups are simply responding to something already present in Austen; making blatant what she so elegantly obscured. From “Northanger Abbey,” we know that Austen thought that gothic tales were silly: what would she make of today’s monster invasion?

Get a weekly digest about the world in literature from The New Yorker.Get a weekly digest about the world in literature from The New Yorker.